Air France-KLM: Change is in the air to delight customers with “made-just-for-me” travel experiences

Air France-KLM: Change is in the air to delight customers with “made-just-for-me” travel experiences

Martine Vesco joined Talend in 2016 as a Senior Customer Marketing Manager. In this role, Martine develops and maintains a trusted advisor relationship with key customer contacts and creates Customer Reference programs as well as communities.
Prior to Talend, Martine held a number of senior positions in customer marketing at leading software companies such as Dassault Systèmes, Business Objects and Workday.

Air France-KLM serves 90 million passengers per year and 27 million Flying Blue reward program members. The data explosion has been a clear game changer in the last few years, owing especially to social media: Air France-KLM has 16 million fans on Facebook and 3 million Twitter followers.

Travel as you like

Many airlines fly to the same destinations, so a key differentiator is the level of service you can provide. Customers will not ask their carrier to "make them travel," but "to travel as they like”.

Air France-KLM’s biggest challenge was to re-centralize all client information to be able to share it with all Air France-KLM group agents. The company implemented a big data platform developed in-house on Hadoop.

Data Management inside

To create a 360-degree view, Air France-KLM introduced Talend to organize this data platform and address data management challenges.

The airline has implemented a complete data quality policy to verify the quality of data with Talend Data Quality. Up to one million data entries are corrected per month with this tool. The issue of data security is also raised, since Air France-KLM processes clients’ personal data, and this data must be protected. Data masking consists of anonymizing a part of the client data for analytical needs.

Air France-KLM also implemented Talend Metadata Manager to be able to share information within the company– which now enables to determine where data is located, where it is coming from and where it is going, ten times faster than before.

360-degree customer vision for a better travel experience

“Our goal, by compiling all our clients’ data, is to reassure them throughout their entire trip with us”, explains Gauthier Le Masne - Chief Customer Data Officer. “We will start from home, where, by geolocating them, we will let them know how much time they need to get to the airport. When clients reach the airport, their gate may have changed. They will automatically receive a Facebook Messenger message informing them of the new departure gate”.

Each time you travel with Air France-KLM, the airline studies your history and preferences, and can also send you a deal on the next destination that might interest you.

Gauthier Le Masne concludes:” Our wish is to be systematically in contact with each client. It will involve face to face contact with our teams and their tablets. And direct contact with our clients if they have the smartphone application. And if they don’t have the application, it will also involve connecting with our clients via social media”.

The goal is to have several tens of millions of unique experiences with this data platform.